Ok, so I like electronic dance music, more specifically Trance. Unfortunately, the US, it's let's just say... a bit behind in that department. If you ever hear such music on the radio, or even in the street, let me know (for instance, in Australia, I heard great Trance in even a waterslide park of all places, and in Europe you can easily get EDM/Trance on broadcast radio). At least that was very true when I wrote this around year 2000.
With San Francisco and San Jose nearby, I've had some opportunities to see some great EDM/Trance DJs. Back in the early 2000's, they sadly played club music in the US that was nowhere close to the hits they had composed and were known for, but over the years, as Trance started becoming more popular, those DJs finally started playing their good tunes in the US too, and maybe from 2004 on, it's only been getting better.

Since 2004 (it's now 2016), the good news is that Trance has grown quite a following in the US, and places like the SF Bay Area, and while Trance has been declared dead a few times in the last 10 years, it's still going strong here, and we're lucky to have at least one or two big Trance parties per year, so yeah! Trance Family SF is definitely strong in the area, I'm thankful of the friends I made there.

Over time, I've seen many of my favorite DJs across the world, whether it was locally, in New York City, Canada, Australia, and of course Ibiza, and at Halloween 2004, I finally attended some great local parties that proved that you could get the good stuff locally too (even if all the artists came from other countries ). Popsicle Halloween 2004 was really the beginning of great music parties in the San Francisco Area, and thankfully things have gotten even better since then

Considering how much I listen to his music (I just managed to get more than 140 episodes of a State of Trance, and almost everything from episode 78 onwards: 216, please drop me a note if you might have the 5 or 6 I'm missing), I could not miss Armin coming to San Francisco again this year (thank you for stopping by)
Turns out that I had actually been sick for the last 4 days including that sunday, and spent part of the day in bed, but I could not resolve to missing his set, so I doped myself up (that is with caffeine, aspirine, anti-cold symptoms medecine, and diet rock star), and drove up to San Francisco.
The warm up DJ was playing some quite nice stuff, and then Armin came up and took the crowd .
Armin played for almost 4 hours, a quite nice set I might add, and just kept giving more at the end, honoring several "one more tune", to the point where he played almost one hour after initial signs of him being about done (going from about 23:40 to 03:40)
I also got to be backstage, i.e. by the DJ booth, and hang out with Armin while he was spinning. This just gave me another chance to see how much of a nice guy Armin is, and how much he still enjoys his work, even when being the #3 DJ in the world (and quite frankly, he is way in front of PvD, who doesn't seem to care nearly as much anymore, and I also think he can give Tijs a run for his money )
All in all, it was a great night, and I forgot everything about being sick while I was there, which confirm that "Armin heals!" (ok, just kidding )

I should add that Armin's website now has a link to
Audio
Jelly/Armada, to let you buy Shivers, his latest album, online. I'm
mentioning this because I don't care much for CDs and ripping when I can buy
the MP3s directly. I think it's very cool that Armin is one of the artists who
has now started offering digital medium over the internet.